Burk on Books - 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know

A little less than a year ago I told you about "97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know," a ground-breaking book O'Reilly had just published. I was very excited about the book for two reasons. The first is that the contents were contributed by experts from around the world under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, which means it's kind of an open source book. The second thing is that I wrote two of the 97 things chosen to be in the book.

If you read that post then you might share my feeling of deja-vu when I tell you that in a couple of weeks O'Reilly will publish a new "97 Things" book. This one is titled "97 Things Every Programmer Should Know" and once again I wrote two of the 97 things appearing in the book.

I'm hoping that programmers of all stripes will find the contents useful and interesting enough that it outsells the first book. If you'd like to take a sneak peek at the articles, they're available at the O'Reilly web site's 97 Things wiki.

If you like what you find there, please consider buying the book. No, I'm not suggesting you buy the book because I'm looking for a big royalty check. Remember the Creative Commons License I told you about? The only "payment" a contributing author gets is a free copy of the book. I want to boost sales for three reasons:

1. I think most developers will find it a valuable resource.
2. I think that good book sales will encourage O'Reilly to keep adding books to the series
3. I've got an idea for a 97 Things book I want to see in print.

If you do read the articles, please leave a comment here or send me an email. I'd love to hear from you.

Thanks for your time and attention,

Burk Hufnagel

Questions and Answers: O'Reilly's got both

As of today there's a new place to go when you have questions (or answers) about pretty much anything you think is interesting. With the tag line "Clever Hacks, Creative Ideas, Innovative Solutions", answers.oreilly.com has set an expectation that this is the place to go when you need to know something that most folks don't have a clue about.

While O'Reilly has earned a reputation as a great source for technical information because of their books and their magazines (Make and Craft), that's not good enough for them. They've also built an online community and are expanding it with this latest addition. One neat difference between Answers and other Q&A places it that there's a section for sharing information that nobody's asked about yet. So if you know how to do something or solve a gnarly problem, you can preemptively post it there.

Recent entries (as of Nov 3, 2009) include information on SEO (Search Engine Optimization), file sharing between Mac OSX and Windows 7, HTML 5 and Palm's webOS, regular expressions, and Drupal. Like I said, lots of things most folks don't have a clue about.

So if you've got a tough question, know the answer to tough questions, or just want to share some of what you know without waiting to be asked, then head on over. It's free - though you do need an O'Reilly account to do anything more than look around. But even that is more than worth the time.

Oh yes, there's social aspects too. (After all Tim O'Reilly is "closely associated" with the term "Web 2.0".) You can make friends (Hi, Marsee!), build a reputation, and even earn badges for things like posting regularly, blogging, reviewing books (Huzzah!) or making lots of friends there.

It's still in beta, but I think you'll have a lot of fun and learn a thing or three so why not head on over now. The URL is http://answers.oreilly.com and it's open now!

After you've looked around there a bit, please consider coming back here and sharing your thoughts about O'Reilly's new addition to their community site.

P.S. Yes, I know there's way more links in this article than I usually use. I figured that it might make it easier for you to check out some of the things I'm writing about without being too pushy. Let me know what you think and it may affect how I do things in the future. Thanks!